AGNI 21
Contents
Editor’s Note
Introduction to This Issue’s Poetry
Essays
James Wright’s “Hammock”: A Sounding
Poetry
William Rimmer: “Flight and Pursuit”
by Dick Allen
The Clergyman’s Wife Composes a Spring Letter
by Dick Allen
Physics
by John Allman
The Birth of Time
by John Allman
Toy Soldiers
by Jim Barnes
Details
The Waves at Matsushima
Driving the County Blacktop
What the Right Hand Gives, the Left Takes Away
by Teresa Cader
Parts Do Not Make a Whole
by Teresa Cader
The Green House
The Plane
Sentence
Silver Lake
The Threshold for the Definition of “Numinous” is a Variable
The Garden of Acclimatization
from Pond Subjects: 3. Fjord, 4. High School, 5. Edmunds!—, 6. Ishmael, 8. Narcissus, 13. Letter to My Brother, 16. Before Lauds
In Labor
Problem Solving
by Gary Ligi
Babies
The Rivers of England
Anglian Music
The Air of Cathedrals
The Pilot’s Daughter
Faith
Berlin Metro
Poem with Afternoon Light
by Bea Opengart
Leningrad Triptych
Translated from the Russian by Ilya Nykin and Pamela White Hadas
Britons Leaving France
The Fall (Bababadalgharag., etc.)
The String Quartet of the Birds
Unintentional Lullaby
The Driver Kept on Going
Charleston
Poem After Several Images in Calvino
by Jane Staw
Books by Nobody
Orchard
An Art of Remoteness
My Old Man
Featured Poet: Patricia Storace
Poetry
Vocation
Spring Afternoon
August: Blues
A Weekend at the Last Resort
Simple Sums
Intaglio
Death: A Betrothal
Exile’s Matins
Varieties of Religious Experience
Founder Askold Melnyczuk opens AGNI 21—an emphatically Whitmanesque issue—by stressing the role and responsibility of the poet, particularly in relation to the ongoing mystery of the American experiment. The poet must once again fuse “the material world, that of the body,” with “the spiritual world, that of the word.” This cannot be done purely through adherence to the conventions of technique. It requires imagination and careful perception, as found here in the poems of Agha Shahid Ali, Albert Goldbarth, Wayne Koestenbaum, Irina Ratushinskaya, Dick Allen, Rosanna Warren, and many others. Fiction by Lee Abbott and Sharon Sheehe Stark balance against an essay in which Sven Birkerts untangles the knots in James Wright’s “Hammock.”
| Founding Editor | Askold Melnyczuk | ||
| Editor | Sharon Dunn | ||
| Advisory Editor | John J. Clayton | ||
| Contributing Editors | Sven Birkerts | ||
| Norman Dukes | |||
| Managing Editor | Judith Vannice | ||
| Editorial Assistant | Keith Dawson |